Backstage

Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals. It enables users to configure and centralize data, documentation, links, and general information about their components and applications and their human-legible resources into one navigation area. This enables users to track and visualize information in one centralized location.

Architecture

Backstage as it relates to bigbang will provide users with a way to register their existing addon components and appliations through the use of catalog and component YAML files that are built and stored parallel to the code they represent. These will allow users to define their own software catalogs efficiently as part of their workflow, providing an effective source of truth that is easily visualized and navigated through backstage. Bigbang provides catalogs for existing bigbang components and some addons.

Big Bang Touchpoints

Licensing

Backstage is open-source, licensed under Apache License 2.0.

UI

Backstage provides a UI for both management, navigation, search, andother necessary functions as part of its standard offerings. Backstage catalog enables users to search and add/edit components, user groups, users, system definitions (component groups), file / resource locations, APIs, among other things. It utilizes options for local or remote YAML catalog definitions to store catalog YAML remotely as code, and add them into backstage at deployment seamlessly via values.

Storage

Bigbang Backstage is capable of integrating with an external postgresql database only at this time. These values are defined in the backstage chart.

Logging

Backstage writes its logs to stderr. These logs will be picked up by the logging collector configured within the cluster.

Monitoring has been configured to use the Bigbang monitoring package (Prometheus and Grafana). This is automatically enabled by having monitoring enabled in the main values file.

# Monitoring
#
monitoring:
  # -- Toggle deployment of Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager).
  enabled: true

Health Checks

Backstage has liveness and readiness checks available at the following paths: https://backstage.com/.backstage/health/v1/readiness https://backstage.com/.backstage/health/v1/liveness These endpoints return 200 OKs, and a JSON {“status”: “ok”} response.

Single Sign On (SSO)

Backstage can be integrated with Keycloak for single sign on. Full documentation can be found in the package docs here. If you already have keycloak available, you may configure backstage addon values at addons.backstage.sso within bigbang chart/values.yaml.